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# Brothers take their jabs at hopefuls
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/brothers-take-their-jabs-at-hopefuls/
- Published: 2004-07-27T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T04:46:08.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: local, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*Satirical film is an equal opportunity offender*

*By JOHN F. MULLER Special to the Daily Press*

Two and a half years ago, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis loaded all their possessions into a truck in Brooklyn and started driving. They hadn’t a clue where they were headed.

On Monday, the brothers, who both work in Santa Monica, prepared for a guest appearance on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” to talk up their wildly popular Internet political satire. Their appearance aired after speeches by leading Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore implored Americans to support presidential challenger John Kerry at the Democratic National Convention.

Life hasn’t been the same for Gregg, 33, and Evan, 30, since the launch of their hit parody at JibJab.com — which quickly became one of the hottest sites on the ’net after the two-minute feature was first posted July 9.

Set to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” the cartoon is equally insulting to President George W. Bush and Kerry, each of whom takes verbal shots at the other and takes time to dance vaudevillian softshoe to the familiar refrain of “this land will surely vote for me.”

Produced in a warehouse on Berkeley Street, the site registered 5 million hits in the week after the parody first appeared and 3.7 million last Friday alone. The intense interest has resulted in intermittent server crashes and a lot of sleepless nights for the Spiridellis brothers.

“It’s been absolute insanity,” said Evan Spiridellis, who does the animation for the pair’s films. “We’ve been doing this for five years, and all of a sudden the phones are ringing off the hook. We’ve got 30,000 e-mails and we’re just two guys in a warehouse.”

The two candidates-turned-animated-cutout-figures stop at nothing in the short. The animated Bush calls Kerry a “liberal wiener” who offers flip-flops instead of tax breaks. The cartoon Kerry calls Bush a “right-wing nut job” who’s “dumb as a door knob” and reminds viewers on multiple occasions that he’s won three purple hearts.

“We had no political agenda in making this piece,” Evan Spiridellis said. “It was just to try to bring some comedy to a very nasty political season. Maybe that’s why it spread so far. It is so nasty. Maybe everybody just needed a little laugh.”

The site sure has spread far. Parts of “This Land” have appeared on NBC’s “Today Show,” CBS’s “Early Show,” the “NBC Nightly News,” Fox News and CNBC.

“We never expected this kind of response,” Evan Spiridellis said. “We always were trying to get something out there... it hasn’t quite sunk in yet.”

The brothers have been up day and night for much of the past three weeks, eating whatever has been available and drinking lots of coffee. Evan Spiridellis said they have been trying to read each of the responses that have been pouring in, but it hasn’t been easy even keeping the site together.

“Our tech guy had gotten a real job,” he said. “He had just moved to Florida, but we flew him out here on a red-eye (flight) after we were on the ‘Today Show.’ He was buying a house.”

JibJab Media does contract work for Disney, Cartoon Network, USA Networks and Sony, among other companies. The Spiridellis brothers launched it from a garage in Brooklyn in 1999, shortly after they were drawn to Internet animation in 1998 by a vulgar online cartoon. At the time, Gregg Spiridellis was an MBA student at the Wharton School of Business and Evan Spiridellis was an accomplished independent animator. Since then, the two have also published numerous children’s books, including their best-selling debut, “Are You Grumpy, Santa,” which portrays Santa on a terrible day.

“Basically, we looked at the technology and thought, every new technology offers new opportunities,” Evan Spiridellis said. “When you look at the Disney brothers, their big break was putting in sound. Jim Henson looked at a TV and thought of puppets. New technology opens new channels. We thought the Internet would be that for us.”

The brothers plan to work on an animated feature film after things die down, but viewers keep on coming. So far, the response has been hugely positive across the board, Evan Spiridellis said.

“One guy said, ‘I’m a liberal wiener, my dad is a right-wing nut job, and when we saw the movie together we laughed and talked politics with a smile for a first time in years,’” he said. “And within the office environment, we’ve gotten a lot of e-mails saying that all the right-wing conservatives and left-wing liberals watched it and were laughing together.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/072704-02_01.jpg)

(Photo: BY JOHN F. MULLER Special to the Daily Press)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 27, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/072704.pdf?ref=smdp.com)